London riots: courts struggle to cope with flood of riot cases

The justice system is creaking under the weight of cases generated by the
riots in London as a senior police source warned that many of the
ringleaders are still to be caught.

A hooded youth walks past a burning vehicle in HackneyPhoto: GETTY

By Mark Hughes, John Bingham and Victoria Ward

6:30AM BST 15 Aug 2011

Chaos ensued as magistrates’ courts were forced to open on a Sunday to allow for the huge numbers arrested.

The heavy police presence on the streets has also resulted in a flurry of arrests of “ordinary” offenders who need to be processed.

Scotland Yard’s Acting Commissioner, Tim Godwin, has said he expects more than 3,000 people to be caught in connection with violence, disorder and looting in London. So far 1,401 have been arrested, with 808 charged.

Yesterday, a senior police source said that many of those still to be arrested are ringleaders who “organised and orchestrated” the violence in Tottenham last Saturday — sparking three further days of rioting — but are more difficult to catch.

The source said: “There are lots and lots of people who are virtually giving themselves away and it is just a case of catching up with them.

“Those are the people we are seeing in court at the moment. But the more complex investigation, which is also ongoing, is into the disturbances in Tottenham. We are working on that to identify who was behind all of that, those who organised and orchestrated.”

Around 16,000 police officers were deployed on London’s streets in response to last week’s violence. The numbers remained at this level throughout the weekend.

An apparent result was large numbers of arrests for relatively minor offices.

Yesterday, 79 defendants appeared at Camberwell Green and City of Westminster magistrates’ courts. Many, however, were arrested on Saturday for offences unconnected with the riots and were simply being processed.

A court spokesman said there was a bottleneck because police worked round the clock while the courts did not, but dealing with other cases would free up space for riot cases.

He said there were also two magistrates sitting behind the scenes issuing arrest warrants to continue Operation Withern, the police investigation into the disorder in London.

In Court One at Westminster, Deborah Wright, the district judge, became angry at having to repeatedly rise because papers and defendants were not ready. Nicola Wood, prosecuting, had to explain she did not have papers and was unfamiliar with the cases.

At 11.30am, with no defendants seen, Mrs Wright said: “It is now one and a half hours into sitting time and we have done nothing in this court.”

Once again yesterday district judges handed out numerous prison sentences for offences which appeared relatively minor.

A Crown Prosecution Service source said that judges dealing with rioters at the magistrates’ courts had been instructed to be “draconian”.